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The real work, the heavy lifting, starts where the frontier ends. The pioneers, the Lewis and Clarks, just drew their index fingers to the West and moved forward ho. Then, when it was all mapped and named, Neil Armstrong looked to the moon and said, upward. Even after that, we squirmed around, followed the empire’s imperative—out, go, spread. But today’s America doesn’t want to walk on the moon, and it doesn’t want a new war. Are we settled now? Is this it?

Mayor James Thompson of Sugar Land, Texas wants you to know that his city is not for sale. Which, at first, is not surprising at all, because usually towns are not for sale. This was in February, after SugarDaddie.com, a website that helps older men connect with younger women, offered four and a half million dollars to Sugar Land, Texas for the town to change its name to SugarDaddie.com, Texas.

“Really, it was never even a consideration of the mayor,” councilman Joe Zimmerman tells the Independent over the phone. “All of us in Sugar Land are very passionate and proud of our history.” In city hall, a plaque hangs on the wall, with pictures and little blurbs that tell the story of this sugar plantation town. Back in 1843, Samuel May Williams founded the Imperial Sugar company here, which has been headquartered in Sugar Land ever since. It was a company town—Imperial housed its workers, built schools for the children and hospitals for the sick. It was self-sufficient that way, and the railroads only helped Imperial to keep its little town happy and well fed.

The Imperial Sugar factory is no longer in service, now a big brick landmark off the highway. Still, Zimmerman notes, “we are very protective of our past, recognizing that we have moved well beyond a sugar town.” Asked if there were an offer to be made right here, right now that would persuade Sugar Land otherwise, he belts a hearty chuckle that rings through the phone. Names are names, and places are places, and especially in Texas, tradition is tradition. Geography, Joe announces, is not a commodity.

In 2005, the five members of the Santa, Idaho town commission vote unanimously to rename the town SecretSanta.com in exchange for at least $20,000 from the gift-sharing website. The company is allowed to erect signs all over town, though the town post office keeps its name so that there will be no disappointment when thousands of children, as do and have done for decades, send their annual letters to Santa’s Idaho address come December.

Five years earlier, after an offer of $110,000 and twenty new computers for the school computer lab, Halfway, Oregon becomes Half.com, America’s First Dot-Com City, according to the signs. Nothing, of course, is Dot-Com-y about it; Halfway is a small town along a main road, sitting in a vast, barren valley beside Oregon’s snowtips. Beautiful, to be sure, but a publicity ploy in name only. “We literally put the brand on the map,” Half.com vice president Mark Hughes announced.

The same year: Clark, Texas, a little town in Denton County with a population of just about 200, becomes DISH, Texas. EchoStar Communication Corporation offers the residents of DISH, Texas free cable for ten years; Mayor Bill Merritt is happy to oblige. “We really look at this as kind of a rebirth for our community.”

Topeka, Kansas becomes Google, Kansas on March 1, 2010 in a bid to help persuade Google to invest its fiber optic technology in the city. They held the name for a month as a push to attract Google’s “Fiber for Communities” program, which offered to install its new Internet technology in a handful of locations.

There is something irksome here, something laughable in the same way that Joe Zimmerman and the council of Sugar Land, TX laughed when they first encountered a bid from SugarDaddie.com. The idea of SugarDaddie.com, Texas first appalls us on a very immediate, superficial level. We would never want our children growing up in a hometown named after the venerable tradition of online dating. It’s quite similar to the feeling we get when we talk about White Settlement, Texas. A population of 16,000, the town needed to distinguish itself from the Native American settlement nearby. When city representatives announced a referendum to change its name in 2005, residents rejected the change by a landslide 2,388 votes to 219.

In this democratic assertion of White Settlement’s name, though, we open the door to a larger discomfort, one that transcends democracy entirely. Despite its questionable
racial politics, White Settlement stands for a tradition that its citizens are prepared to defend. In SugarDaddie.com, on the other hand, we are forced to confront a different kind of logic, one that seems peculiar largely because it is familiar: corporations target those facets of our lives thought to be off-limits. At the dinner table, my mother used to make us put our cell phones on the counter before we ate. If I texted under the table, I didn’t get dessert. When I visit my parents in 2013, we are texting each other under the table to discuss dad’s lamb chops, or checking our email, or doing something that we once thought to be not-dinner-table-appropriate. We grow accustomed to the technological tragedies of the past, the voice of the elderly scolding the kids these days waxes anachronistic, and we move to inhabit the new spaces that our companies carve out for us. An advertisement I encountered last month reads: “How to Tattoo a company’s Brand Name or Logo and how to Get Paid from Them.” Meanwhile, Google’s Glass project, a headset that integrates our in-the- world vision with our on-the-web one, seeks to refashion the living experience itself. We would, with Glass, wake up to Google, although most of us already do.

In this sense, the investment in geography appears to be the next step in corporate empire. First, the consumable, then the corporeal, now the country itself. The Corporate America—a formal, legal, explicit one, where public space is claimed as private, each little house on the prairie.com—is around the corner; that’s just the free market at work.

It’s a dystopic vision (and perhaps a paranoid one), the nation dominated by the Company Town. As Hardy Green writes in Company Town, “To those who like to think of the United States as a sweet land of liberty, the very words sound un-American.” If Americans are free, they cannot be bound to the corporation, who might, in this dystopic vision, administer where people live and what they eat and whom they worship.

“It’s true,” Green writes. “Company towns are un- American—and they are the essence of America.”

In 1903, milton hershey purchased 1,200 acres of barren land in Derry Church, Pennsylvania. He was moving away from New York City, where his candy shop had recently closed, looking to expand on his line of five-cent Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bars.

He hired surveyors to map out the plot, and an architect to begin developing blueprints for his Hershey’s Chocolate factory and the town that would grow around it. “Such a place,” Hershey dreamed, “would serve as a standing advertisement for the Hershey Co., its wholesome values, and its products,” Green writes. There would be, in Hershey’s own words, “no poverty, no nuisances, no evil.”

And Hershey was right. His town had zoos and parks, schools and hospitals, pools and trolleys. Hershey workers received all of the benefits of the company town, with housing and medicine and retirement included. There was a junior college with free tuition; town churches received $20,000 endowments. Hershey’s wife Kitty developed the Hershey Industrial School inside the town, housing and educating orphans and providing them with $100 upon graduation. And, of course, there were no funeral homes or cemeteries allowed in the town; mortality and candy are unprofitable, albeit natural, bedfellows. Milton Hershey—who would act as the self-appointed mayor of his Pennsylvania Disneyland— was remaking the American city in chocolate. “The village had become such a sensation that little other marketing was needed—and the company ceased its print advertising,” Hardy writes.

Hershey, Pennsylvania would thrive in the following decades. Expanded production, new amenities, healthy hearth and home. Though different in style and scale, Hershey and the Dot-Com cities of our decade are based on the same mutual promise of exchange: big business offers services to town residents; residents offer control of their public space. Half.com offers a new computer lab to the school; Hershey offers a new school completely. This was how America was formed, industry first, people second, chasing each other westward across the continent.

George Pullman developed his own model town in the 1880s. In four years, he transformed 4,000 acres of Illinois swampland into a large-scale manufacturing town of 8,000 residents. In the city of Pullman, cable car factories loomed over an elegant residential neighborhood of tree-lined streets and brick homes with running water and functioning gas.

Green’s list is long: Firestone Park, Ohio of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company; Alcoa, Tennessee of the aluminum producer Alcoa; Kohler Village, Wisconsin of the Kohler Co. All the way through the ‘40s, when war-time production sprouted insta-cities throughout the West, and into the ‘60s. Valencia, California, for example, was planned by the Newhall Land and Farming Company, separated into little villages with landscaped boulevards that snake along schools and shopping malls and community centers and golf courses. “Built as Promised,” is Valencia’s catchphrase; “Awesometown,” its unofficial brand name.

The recognition of this history, though—of America as the land of the Big Business buy-and-build rather than the Lewis and Clark see-and-settle—is not an endorsement. Pullman’s Illinois model town famously erupted in labor unrest; Hershey’s, much later, the same way. All throughout the company towns of the early twentieth century—mining and coal, oil and steel—workers were exploited heavily by the company benefactor.

Yet the Company Town reminds us, against Joe Zimmerman’s hearty chuckle, that geography has always been a commodity in this country. After all, cities are incorporated, not founded. And states, too, were economic entities before they were patriotic ones. Hawaii, the 50th shining star, had sugar plantations; California, in 1850, had its gold. There’s a confusion in this county between what is public and what is private, what belongs to the country and what belongs to its citizens. There is something irksome about SugarDaddie.com, Texas, but perhaps it’s a discomfort with the origins of America rather than its future. Then again, maybe it’s both.

Still, Hershey was a real human, the type of flesh-and- blood human that, despite Citizens United and the new “corporate humanity,” we recognize as our own. More important, he was a human that lived in his little town in Pennsylvania. SugarDaddie.com has nothing to do with the cute, commercial town of Sugar Land, Texas in just the same way Half.com had nothing to do with the little green hamlet of Halfway, Oregon. This is the key difference between the history of the Company Town and its contemporary counterpart: one is named from within, and one from without. When someone gets on the Hershey’s Kiss ride at the Hershey amusement park, he is reminded of the real things that Hershey produced, the chocolate bars that were made in that now-defunct factory next door. SugarDaddie.com, Texas is instead a commemoration of a far-off organization producing something fundamentally immaterial. The production used to take place within the town; now the product is the town itself.

This reminds us: the jobs are not coming back. The real Company Towns of today’s American industry, or at least the bulk of them, are beyond our borders. But we would never see Nike, Indonesia or Levi Strauss, South Africa; these are not the places to which American companies want to direct our attention. SugarDaddie.com thus forces us to confront this new commercial America, one that has increasingly few monuments or landmarks to offer. The Company Town may have relied on exploitation, but it was exploitation that felt present within the community; it was the workers versus the boss, circumscribed by the town limits.

But capital is mobile, and labor is not. And so there is something about the Dot-Com ownership of America that feels far more in-the-shadows, pulling strings from an invisible skyscraper. These towns have no relationship with their owners, and there is no collective experience. That these websites are selecting cities with such similar names to their domains only serves to reinforce the perception of some sneaky sleight-of-hand. Who is SugarDaddie.com? At least we knew Hershey. He had a smile and a patch of grey hair on his head, and he liked to hold orphans in his arms in the photographs.

There is a part of the american southwest, a few hundred miles east of the Rockies, that looks like an endless checkerboard from above. Clean white lines mark off squares of maroon and brown flatland, each little parcel with its own terrestrial color. Big squares and small squares fit perfectly next to each other, and not an inch is missing from the patchwork. We’ve done an incredible thing making this quilt out of the continent; from the plane, it looks like it could never have been any other way.

It is a scary feeling to approach the geographical singularity, when all the villages on the Amazon have been purged, every nook and cranny of the ocean discovered and plotted and TED-talked. And it is because of the loss of the frontier, a fear that we can only build up now, not out. That isn’t to say that we are not expanding, filling out those empty lots on the outskirts of Phoenix or Las Vegas. But these are spaces that have already been named, even if those names are X35-F or Maricopa County-adjacent. They are merely awaiting investors.

At the end of the frontier, there is no more writing left to do, only re-writing. In the Dot-Com city, we find that the entire country is, in essence, becoming a derivation of itself. So while we may not like the original manuscript— White Settlement, TX, for example, or even Hershey, PA— we are even more concerned with the re-write, because we know who owns the pen.

An acting teacher once told me the most intimate thing you can do on stage is touch someone’s face. You could brush away an eyelash, maybe, or a funny strand of hair. Or cup an upturned chin with a finger or two. This isn’t obvious—to be intimate implies sex, and most plays and nearly all musicals contain at least an embrace, if not a kiss. But somehow, before an audience, hand-to-cheek reads more familiar than bare skin on skin, when one person reaches toward another’s face and no one swerves.

Touching someone’s face on stage or off means they trust you enough to let you reach toward six of the holes of their body—their wet eyes and mouth and dark seashell ears. It means they trust what you are enough to maybe let you in. But how often do we let the people who are not our mothers or fathers hold our faces in their hands?

Stephen Dunn writes that intimacy is the feeling of being ter- ribly understood. His poem “Connubial” describes the danger he felt when, he writes, “with alarming accuracy / she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that / ten- dency, like the way I’ve mastered / the language of intimacy / in order to conceal how I felt—”

Terrible understanding then, the opposite of loneliness, when nothing can be hidden. Not the trifling sources of unease, not the names tucked into small prayers before sleep, not even the red velvet linings of eyelids. This is the price of closeness, of shared privacy. This is crushing familiarity. When you are known so wholly—consumed in the knowing—as to be used up and ready to discard.

//

This is my wrist in your hand, this is my body in quiet; this is your hand on my wrist, this is your body in situ.

This is my body in stitches. This is the shaking off, and the quaking of,
You and me splitting now, together
at the sides.

//

My mother says never to date actors, even though they are of- ten beautiful. And I have, twice, dated actors, but only briefly. I have, always, allowed myself to be stricken with peoples’ outsides.

Thing is, actors have studied how to put the moon in their eyes, to mirror others’ actions so as to make them comfort- able, to listen and repeat. They know that a touch on the upper arm is familiar, but not assuming, and that trailing the backs of their fingertips along the side of someone’s face will make their cheeks pink and ripe to touch.

From studying acting, my mother learned that it is easy to trust those with whom you step into another world. It is natural to look to fellow actors, to those with whom you have contracted to suspend reality, for comfort and company. It is telling the way that feigned intimacy creates connections that feel eerily real.

//

Al Berkman wrote in his 1961 Singers’ Glossary of Stage Jar- gon that “The Intimate Position of the head is that in which both the face and the eyes are directed squarely toward the other person.” Attachment, then, begins with the eyes.

//

1. Explain the procedure to the patient with his/her eyes open. For example, “I am going to touch various parts of your arms (or other body part) with this instrument. I will touch you with either one or two points, and you tell me if you feel one or two points when you feel the touch.”

2. The patient closes his/her eyes, or vision is otherwise impaired.

3. Apply light and equal pressure across the two points.

4. Have the patient identify if they feel one or two points.

5. Move the two points closer together across consecutive trials until the patient cannot distinguish the two points as separate. Document findings.

Note: This test is used to determine the level of enervation in a particular patch of skin; that is, how well a patient can tell two things apart. Eventually, when the two points of the instrument get close enough together, the patient will only be able to perceive a single point.

The tiniest bit of space between makes all the difference.

//

A voice soars in the soul, as gentle and expected as the soft rush of one’s own breath fogging a glass. No one can predict it coming, this feeling, yet its arrival has always felt to me as natural and irresistible as a shiver. It is certain nearness, of trusting enough to lean quivering hinged jaws into the moist flesh of a palm. To be deeply known and still kept: a tingle in the gut that echoes three inches beyond the body in all direc- tions.

//

By singing all of Fauré’s art songs for high voice, I establish a familiarity with his body of work. By kissing Paul four days a week for two months, I establish a familiarity with his body. The difference between intimacy with things and intimacy with people is synechdotal. I am not intimate with the com- poser himself, just his work, but because I am intimate with

Paul’s mouth, it is inferred that I am also intimate—close, dear, private—with him. His parts represent the whole. In that particular case I did care for the whole, though this has not always been true. I resent being handled gingerly by men with whom I have been intimate, who tend to assume I feel intimately toward them all of the time.

//

Cross-legged on the floor of my dorm room, I open and read his letter, his penciled words on looseleaf in shaky, schoolboy cursive and this is what I feel: one hundred tiny and precise and mechanical punctures on the soft underside of my jaw, along the v of my hips, during. The press of icy hands into soft flesh. The places he used to lay his lips. I read about how our sex became his guilt and how he had fasted and prayed and been forgiven, how he hoped I would be forgiven too.

It was a long time ago but he still breaks something that was whole and that I didn’t know I wanted kept that way. I mail it back to him with a three-by-five card reminding him that there was never a third person in bed. Don’t write me.

//

Joni says, Remember that time you told me, you said love was touching souls?

Part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time, she says.

//

My father refused his bar mitzvah at 13, but he is the one who taught me to pray. In the soft voice kept for stories, he taught me to say, “Dear God, please bless…” and then list my loved ones, picturing their faces. He said praying was about loving, not going to church. He said that I could name whomever I wanted. But when I started loving outside my family, I wor- ried that the new names would know somehow that I had beamed their faces into the ether. I worried it would scare them away, that admission of care, the closeness of holding a face in the mind just before the quiet of sleep.

Standing before a roomful of people, I lean in toward a stranger. I am facing Johnny, picturing Paul, softening into the space between. If I do it right, the blue eyes turn brown and there’s a little lurch. And I hope it looks real, or at least close enough.

Even though Ralph Waldo Emerson once called him “the prophet of bran bread and pumpkins,” Sylvester Graham was a serious man. A preacher by training and a lecturer by profession, he concerned himself with nothing less than the human condition. In his “Lecture to Young Men on Chastity,” published in Providence in 1834, Graham argued that people of all ages and of both sexes were causing themselves, and thus society, to become “debased, degraded, diseased and destroyed” by indulging in sensory excess of all kinds, but most significantly, in “self-pollution.”

A man chasing fame, he saw his Northampton, MA home one day becoming a museum in his honor. Were he alive today, though, Graham would likely not be impressed by his legacy. He became a household name, to be found in cupboards and pantries across America, but the graham crackers that we know bear little resemblance to the cure he developed for America’s most shameful ills. Indeed, the innocent s’more is a perversion of Graham’s enduring contribution to American childhood.

Graham developed “the science of human life” according to which self-pollution, lasciviousness, and, most acutely, masturbation, could cause almost every possible malady. He outlined his specific worries in On Chastity: it was not so much the “mere loss of semen” with which he concerned himself, but the “peculiar excitement, and the violence of the convulsive paroxysms, which produce the mischief.” He addressed his speech to young men, but was quick to point out that women were only by nature slightly less at risk than their male counterparts. He geared his teachings towards the younger generation because he had already written off the older perpetrators. The damage was too significant; the vice was too entrenched. Graham’s background as a minister and his readings in the new field of physiology heavily informed his work. Stephen Nissenbaum, in Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America, explains: “Graham wished to purge the souls of his generation by cleansing their debauched bodies.”

Masturbation, and even excessive consensual intercourse, was a crime of the body and of the mind, and each one fed the other, leading the weakened victim down a spiral of physical and psychological impairment. His problems with this depraved sport were manifold. Besides the violence of the act, the effort that it required, and the exhaustion that ensued, there were three other issues at stake.

The first was the early age at which men, in particular, fell prey to the habit, a phenomenon that he saw as “one of the most alarming evils in our land.” Because of this, entire generations were reaching adulthood debilitated, “with a broken-down constitution, with a body full of disease, and with a mind in ruins.” The next was that the tyrannical occupation was a solitary one. The perpetrator did not need the consent of any other person and therefore the only prerequisite was an easy one: privacy. It seemed as though there was nothing stopping young people from indulging freely whenever they found themselves without company. The final and perhaps most threatening repercussion of self-pollution was the guilt that Graham claimed naturally ensued. This was the most insidious of problems: “every one who is guilty of it, feels an instinctive shame, and deep self- loathing, even in his secret solitude, after the unclean deed is done!” The depression that followed reckless masturbation posed a great threat to society: men were becoming listless, indecisive, and pessimistic. Today, this sounds like stale rhetoric, but Nissenbaum argues that Graham was the first writer to express “a new fear of human sexuality that would become one of the trademarks of the late nineteenth century.”

Graham was steadfastly ambitious and committed to curing this social disease. In an obituary printed in 1851 in The Farmer’s Cabinet, an Amherst, NH newspaper, the author describes the tireless lecturer: “His character evinced energy and decision, and his influence on the public mind was rather beneficial than deleterious.” The medical establishment was not so generous, however, and heavily criticized his theories. Perhaps this was because, like other health reformers, he was a proponent of preventive medicine and criticized mainstream doctors’ risky and ill-conceived procedures. He didn’t believe in carefully mixed antidotes or indiscriminate scalpel use. Instead, his prescription was for disciplined dieting and exercise.

Graham advised sufferers to stay away from strong foods—such as meat, alcohol, spices, and caffeine—for they would stimulate the organs too much. Furthermore, he encouraged regular exercise (except riding on horseback if it caused “involuntary emissions”), sleeping on a hard bed, and cold baths. In On Chastity, he taught his followers that all bodily systems were connected: “[E]very irritation and undue excitement of the brain and stomach and intestines, are calculated to continue the involuntary emissions; while the latter, in turn, keep up and increase the morbid irritability of those organs.” Furthermore, he considered the stomach “the grand central organ” that affected and was influenced by all the others.

As such, digestion was of the utmost importance, and anything stalling it would harm to individual physical and mental health, as well as the entire society’s hopes for a better future. Thus, Graham waged his greatest battle against white bread. Bread was changing quickly in the early 19th century, and he did not like the direction it was headed. In the growing market economy, bread production had left the household and Americans were suffering because of it. Graham reviled public bakeries, which produced multiple batches at once, relying on mechanization, processed flour, and additives. These breads lacked nutritional value and caused constipation, which Graham related directly to the urge for self-stimulation. “Farinaceous food, properly prepared, is incomparably the best alignment for such a sufferer…taken with or without a little good unfermented molasses, at proper times, and freely masticated, will digest easily and pleasantly, and will be sure to keep up a regular and healthy motion of the bowels.” It is for this exact purpose that Graham developed the recipe for graham bread, later to be transformed into a less perishable, drier cracker.

Nissenbaum explains that graham bread “was in fact nothing more than traditional homegrown and homemade whole wheat bread with a few added twist in preparation and an aggressively ideological rationale.” Social critics in the 1830s, including Graham, feared that the growing dependence on the unstable and anonymous marketplace was affecting American morals. This decade, then, saw the rise of prescriptive literature, informing eager young men and women on how best to run a household, bargain with shop clerks, and curb unseemly urges. Graham bread, however, was not fated to restore Americans to responsible self-subsistence. By the 1840s, bakeries were producing it en masse and historians speculate that entrepreneurial physicians were selling graham crackers as we know them as early as the 1860s.

Graham was a radical and was regarded with a mix of amusement and disdain, but that is not to say that a great number of Americans did not follow his recommendations for generations to come. James C. Whorton argues in his article “Patient, Heal Thyself: Popular Health Reform Movements as Unorthodox Medicine,” that he was the main voice of the health reform movement. It certainly helped that his home base was New England: Whorton describes Boston as the “smug center of reformist sentiment.” It was such a hotbed that angry Bostonian butchers who were threatened by Graham’s promotion of vegetarianism mobbed him on more than one occasion.

The illustrious reformer died at the age of 57. In his final months, he broke his own diet by eating meat and drinking alcohol in a last-ditch effort to cure himself. The physician who cared for him in his last year was unable to diagnose his illness, and, in an ironic twist, blamed it on the “somewhat irregular life” he had led.

The first time i left my body, I was fifteen. It was revelatory. For no particular reason, I looked in the mirror and was suddenly meeting someone for the first time. It inspired me, with my adolescent faux-profundity, to write a poem about the illusory nature of the self.

Then things got creepy. It went from spiritual revelation to identity fragmen- tation. I became more and more conscious of the split between the image and the self it represented. I would decide to move my hand and marvel that it moved in response to a mere thought. I wondered why my thoughts could control Suzy’s body and nobody else’s. I wondered how I even had access to Suzy’s thoughts. As I floated further and further away from Suzy, I felt invasive for even knowing she existed. I felt like a fraud for masquerading as her. I felt misunderstood for being seen as her. I hated her.

I feel the same sickening severance when I look at a picture and think, “Who’s that ugly girl in the front?” only to realize it’s me, when I hear my own recorded voice, and when I wonder why I see the world through my own eyes and nobody else’s. Maybe, you say, as if it’s obvious, because they’re my eyes. But they are mine only insofar as I see through them, only insofar as an optic nerve connects them to my brain—and what makes the brain mine? That’s a similarly disturbing problem. My brain is usually too tired to think about itself, but when it does, I feel like a snake eating its tail, so wound up it can’t escape its own belly, so thick from self-consumption that it chokes.

My childhood fantasies of the future always contained the hidden as- sumption that one day I would leave my body. Sometimes my future self was a Maybelline model with luscious lips and equally modelesque man-candy; later I envisioned myself as one of the giants of poststructuralist philosophy, sitting around a table with Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Foucault, and Barthes anachronisti- cally all at once. I did not become a supermodel, and I did not become a French man.

But as someone with two X-chromosomes, I developed a devalued and objectified body unfit for a philosopher. Looking for an exit route, I grew so airy and detached I felt my mind would expand like a balloon and float into space. Maybe it already had. I could be going about my daily routine without con- sciousness like a very advanced robot (I tend to believe consciousness is epiphe- nomenal rather than causally efficacious). For all I knew, I was already floating in space, connected via some wireless network to my body, perceiving its immediate surroundings only because I was collecting data from its sensory organs.

For a while i forgot i needed to eat, or perhaps convinced myself I didn’t need to. My mind had no idea what my body wanted. This was fine with me. I did not want to associate myself with something as base and material as food. My body was too heavy to express my inner ethereality. This asceticism bears similarities to anorexia mirabilis, a condition different from, but debatably a precursor to, anorexia nervosa, which afflicted several medieval holy women. Saint Margaret of Cortona, who died of starvation in 1297, wrote, “I have no intention of making peace between my body and my soul…allow me to tame my body by not altering my diet; I will not stop for the rest of my life, until there is no more life left.”

Saint Catherine of Siena claimed that she did not need food because she ate at the Banquet of God; she was above embodied existence. She renounced all carnal pleasures and had visions of marrying Jesus with a ring made of his fore- skin, which some might say resulted from sexual repression, just as some might say her mystical visions were starvation-induced hallucinations. But what I find more interesting is the possibility that it worked the other way around: she didn’t want food or sex because whatever satisfaction she could get from them paled in comparison to the fulfillment she got from her spiritual life.

Joan Brumberg argues that these saints were different from modern anorexics because they starved for spiritual, not bodily, purposes. Joan Brumberg has obviously never been anorexic. She writes that anorexia nervosa is a “secular addiction” in pursuit of “an external body configuration rather than an internal spiritual state.” But we are too closely descended from the likes of St. Catherine to have a “secular” addiction, and sometimes external configurations gain their power from the internal states they symbolize.

The main difference I see is that the out-of-body experiences of St. Cath- erine consisted of self-discovery (if also insanity), whereas I discovered a non-self. Rather than saying “this is what I am—an ethereal soul!” my mind had no iden- tity and thus could attach itself to anyone or anything, a parasite surviving off its host. I think of Voldemort on the back of Professor Quirrell’s head, feeding off his body until he gained the power to grow a body of his own. Perhaps my image of myself as a male poststructuralist philosopher resulted from this belief that my mind would eventually sprout a body to better fit its self-conception. But could a mind without an identity physically express itself? Maybe not. Still, I could not help but think that maybe if I lived in a body less fraught, less determinative of how people think of me—in other words, less female—the task might become possible.

One account of disembodiment that sounds more akin to my experience came from Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted: A Memory of Anorexia and Bulimia: “I suddenly felt a split in my brain: I didn’t recognize her. I divided into two: the self in my head and the girl in the mirror. It was a strange, not unpleasant feeling of disorientation, disassociation. I began to return to the mirror often, to see if I could get that feeling back. If I sat very still and thought: Not me not me not me over and over, I could retrieve the feeling of being two girls, staring at each other through the glass of the mirror. I didn’t know then that I would eventually have that feeling all the time. Ego and image. Body and brain.”

Like Hornbacher’s, my mind-body splitting was the precursor to an eating disorder, a self that took up residence in my mind when I was fifteen. Carolyn Costin, a psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders, articulates this phenomenon: “Eating disorder symptoms are the behavioral component of a separate, split-off self, or what I have come to call the ‘eating disorder self.’ This self has a special set of needs, behaviors, feelings, and perceptions, all of which are dissociated from the individual’s core or what I call ‘healthy self.’” I (the observer, the mind, the eating disorder self ) stifled and silenced the other voice, “my” own, until I (the observed, the body, the healthy self) became a mere body used to fulfill my sadistic desires, or perhaps masochistic ones; it is hard for someone split in two to tell the difference. But I don’t think this sadomasochist was the only voice in me, or else its pleasures would have been fulfilled and it/I would have been happy. I imagine another voice calling out to me as I walked through the halls of my high school, a voice within my gut that grew softer as I floated away and away from “my” body.

Unlike my initial mirror split, this episode didn’t feel like a mystical revela- tion. It felt like the crippling self-consciousness and self-objectification characteristic of this condition. I am not just talking about the condition of disordered eating; I am talking about the condition of being a woman. I am talking about internalizing an outsider’s image of my body until my face feels like a mask—all decoration, no sensation. I am talking about sensing that I can’t occupy the word “I” and thus becoming “you” to myself.

When I say “I,” I’m not sure whose words I’m using or who I’m referring to, but I’m sure that the speaker and the object of speech are not the same, and the words that define me are not my own. I cannot speak without splitting. Each “I” is a line drawn between me and the self I speak of. Each eye stares back at the other. Each act of speech masks me with another face, and through this mask I look down on my body in scorn, or at best alienation.

“Given the coupling of mind with maleness and the body with femaleness and given philosophy’s own self-understanding as a conceptual enterprise, it follows that women and femininity are problematized as knowing philosophical subjects and as knowable epistemic subjects,” Elizabeth Grosz writes. Women are defined by materiality, men by mindedness. This is to say not that women are earthly, but that Earth has been made womanly; it is not to say that men are Godly but that God has been made male. So many things have been imbued with references to men and women that we can’t speak of everyday concepts— presence and lack, hardness and softness, ether and earth—without speaking of gender. Man created God in his own image, and God created the world. It fol- lows from this syllogism that man created the world in his own image.

Just as St. Catherine of Siena configured her soul as a transcendent sub- stance trapped in the confines of Mother Earth and by extension in her body, I am a masculine-coded mind trapped in feminine matter/mother (both from the Latin root mater). I have chided myself for behaving as if the Cartesian illusion of mind-body separation is more than an illusion. I should know better, I think; I’ve spent four years studying the neural mechanisms of all thoughts and emotions, the embodiment of cognition, the situatedness of knowledge, and basically how Descartes screwed us all over because the mind-body duality makes no sense. Yet while I know this separation is merely symbolic, I can’t think away my own expe- rience, an experience driven by symbolic distinctions: mind vs. matter, male vs. female. Our culture’s conflict between mind and body is also raging inside me.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, entry into language requires an extra step for women: the adoption of a male perspective, a perspective outside her own body, looking at her own head through eyes foreign yet all too familiar to her. To ac- complish this, language relegates her to the object of an action, or at best she is written as a subject in the passive voice. It is said that women are more empathetic, and that women spend more time considering what men think than vice versa, that women have more understanding of the male mind than men do of the female mind. That is because our culture has no concept of a female mind. If there is one, I leave it on the ground every time I float outside my body to think about it. Lacan famously stated that—le femme n’existe pas—there is no such thing as a woman. I believe I am a woman until I catch myself uttering such a statement, and once again, the “I” who steps outside my head, sizes me up, and classifies me as a woman with impossible certainty is not the “I” who is a woman.

The only way to remain sane has been to forget that the woman I observe and classify is, by most definitions, me. Disembodiment can be both your worst enemy and your best friend if you take it far enough. When I couldn’t bear the weight of the big fat pig I seemed to become in rehab, I told myself it was okay because my body is just a temporary vessel for an everlasting soul. When I felt defeated by the regrowth of curves I had resolved to remove since they first devel- oped, as if I had transformed from a human into a piece of meat, I made an extra effort to use the vocabulary of the male intellectuals I admired so that I could catch people off guard with discussions of postcolonial melancholia before they had the chance to peg me as a potential conquest. My mind is a magician, mak- ing the body invisible while chattering at the audience so they don’t notice it’s actually still there. This defense has proven productive for my education and may have even spawned the essay you are now reading—though my body’s having the last laugh now because this essay is from and about it.

The split is inevitable, necessary, even: without detaching from and ob- serving our bodies, we would not be self-aware. There are just more and less unhealthy ways to deal with the detachment. Freud contended that the world’s greatest artists became successful by channeling physical desires into intellectual pursuits. Like solid matter evaporating into weightless gas, this is called sublima- tion. Frued deemed it the only successful defense mechanism. My immediate re- action is to agree; I’m happy this way, I think. But which “I” is saying this? What would the other I say if she could speak? Where is she? Asleep until thinking-I wakes her with a kiss? Trapped in a cave with Antigone and all the other traitors of the male I?

Luce Irigaray claims that since language is fit only for a masculine subject, women must speak a different language to gain connection to their own bodies. But that can’t happen if there is no woman in the first place, and all that female empowerment talk about vaginas engulfing penises isn’t making me feel more embodied. So I’ve tried yoga, but every time I get down on the mat, I know it’s just a matter of time before I start sublimating. What comes down must go up. Everyone’s in downward dog and I’m in la-la land trying to solve the problem of induction. Any bit of mind left on the ground gets so engrossed in the move- ments that it merges with the body and loses consciousness.

Irigaray says that women defy language because they are so close to them- selves, and that one needs distance from something to speak of it. As I write, I approach the object of inquiry—myself—but I will never reach it. If I arrive at my destination, I will have to abandon it. By the time I reach myself, there will be no self to reach. There will be no “I;” I will be too close to speak. The sentence implodes, subject and object meld together, and the split disappears. I cannot speak without splitting into the self that speaks and the self that is spoken of. So I float off the page, and in the distance I see a girl with a face. It is a pretty face, but I take no pride in it; it is not mine. The most it is good for is to represent me so that I can float further and not be bothered. If I don’t become a Frenchman, I’ll get back to you when I get back to my body.

SUZANNAH WEISS B’13’s body is having the last laugh—this article is merely a receptacle for repressed libido.

In October 2012, gerhard richter’s painting “Abstraktes Bild 809-4” sold for $34 million. The sale earned the painting the superlative “most expensive artwork by a living artist.” The painting’s price sparked controversy in the art world, namely the critique that its monetary value reflected something outside of its artistic quality or relevance. As Blake Gopnick points out in an article from The Daily Beast, “The giant Richter smear that sold on Friday [Abstraktes Bild 809- 4] came 30 years after the photo-based paintings that made him matter as an artist, and it could be mistaken for splashy décor.” If any of Richter’s works are worth $34 million, it should not have been this one. The collectors and their agents sitting in the Christie’s auction that day seemed to be bidding not on how much they valued the work in itself, but rather on the prestige of owning the “most expensive artwork by a living artist” status-symbol.

The “Abstraktes Bild 809-4” auction sale is the latest milestone in the artwork as investment paradigm. It typifies the extreme lengths to which the wealthy are willing to go to own valuable art. The net value of the global art market has more than doubled since 2003, according to TEFAF 2013 Art Market Report. The painting (and any commodifiable form of artwork) has reached new heights in its function as currency in a capitalist economy. Such economic growth is cause for a reevaluation of how the art market works, what type of work it promotes, and how it effects the creation of a new canon of artistic work.

Living artists like Jeff Koons and Gerhard Richter sell single works for tens of millions of dollars. As Roberta Smith of the New York Times shrewdly points out, “the recent in- flated art market has created the illusion that being an artist is a financially viable calling.” While a small percentage of artists like Koons and Richter demonstrate the increased potential for artistic fame and fortune, they do not indicate an increase in financial potential spread evenly across the art world. The reality is that art sales are highly concentrated in the high-end art market. As prominent New York private collector and financier, James R. Hedges IV, noted in the New York Times, “The art world feels like the private equity market of the ’80s and the hedge funds of the ’90s.”

As Dave Hickey, art-critic/academic/behemoth art au- thority, pointed out in an article in the Guardian, art-collec- tors care less and less about anything but the monetary value of a piece: “It used to be that if you [an art-collector] stood in front of a painting you didn’t understand, you’d have some obligation to guess… Now you wouldn’t look at it. You ask a consultant.” The result is an inversion in the sense of value that an artwork holds in the eyes of art collectors. Collectors want to invest in work that will do well in auction. Where art that can be sold was once seen as valuable because it was good, it is increasingly seen as good because it is valuable.

The financial growth of the art market has also contrib- uted to a boost in enrollment at art schools and graduate programs. In the same New York Times article, Roberta Smith claims that because art schools and MFA programs have “ex- panded to accommodate the rising number of art students…” “[they] are now thoroughly invested in keeping these numbers high.” Smith’s claim gets at one of the biggest problems with arts education today: academic art schools and MFA programs are predicated on a false pretense–that paying hundreds of thousands for art school is an economically fruitful invest- ment. Certainly there are some students who would attend art school regardless of whether they ever made back a cent of the tuition they (or their parents) paid, but instead of risking losing the enrollment, art schools have changed their curriculum to be more career-oriented. The professionalization of art schools alone is not necessarily problematic. People need a source of income—why not give “artistic” people the skills to find employment where they can apply some element of their artistic ability?

What minor league teams are to major league scouts, MFA programs are to art investors. Irving Sandler, 87-year-old New York art-authority and author of the influential book The Triumph of American Painting, is quoted in the Village Voice article “How Uptown Money Kills Downtown Art” as saying, “Collectors have had an insidious effect on young artists. They move into graduate schools and offer these kids ridiculous amounts of money. The result is that even art students focus on what sells and continue to produce that kind of work, rather than experiment, which is what they ought to do.” Irving makes the claim that art as investment diverts valuable artistic discourse in MFA programs. The art as investment paradigm turns MFA programs into a breeding grounds for artworks creatively stifled by the desires of investors.

Art school’s relationship to the consumer-market was highlighted when Dave Hickey made a public spectacle of abandoning the art world. “It’s nasty and stupid… I quit,” he wrote in the aforementioned piece in the Guardian last year. He pointed to the way art students seem more focused on self-promotion rather than artistic creation: “When I asked students at Yale what they planned to do, they all say move to Brooklyn – not make the greatest art ever.”

One institution attempting to fill the void left by pre-pro- fessional art programs is the Bruce High Quality Foundation University. The Bruce High Quality Foundation University is the pedagogical vision operated by the Bruce High Quality Foundation (BHQF), a Brooklyn-based art collective. The BHQF is a (semi-) anonymous group, composed of five to eight members, most of whom are Cooper Union graduates. Its mission, according to its website, is to “invest the experi- ence of public space with wonder, to resurrect art history from the bowels of despair, and to impregnate the institutions of art with the joy of man’s desiring.”

Since 2004, the group has used satirical antics to react to over-hyped art spectacles and conventions of the New York City art scene. For example, the Bruces (as they are commonly referred to), pulled a miniature replica of one of Christo’s vinyl orange “gates” (a public sculpture on display in Central Park in 2005) around New York’s waterways in a small motor boat. The display, which they called “The Gate: Not the Idea of the Thing but the Thing Itself,” was an explicit reaction to and diminutive recapitulation of the Christo public sculpture and Robert Smithson’s 2005 “Floating Island”— a posthu- mously realized piece, in which a barge pulled a miniature replica of Central Park around the island of Manhattan. The Bruces’ piece reduced both the size and cost of the other two works. Moreover, by remaining anonymous the Bruces reduced the media’s capacity to make them into recognizable celebrities like Christo and Smithson. The BHQF website explains, “The foundation members were somewhat stunned by the attention that the project received. In large part the attention came simply because of a photograph taken by one man in the twenty-somethingth floor of an office building in DuMBo, and the image took on a life of its own.” The Bruces make a clear effort to direct the public’s attention to the way the media effects art spectacle. Their piece offered its audience a comment on the public’s need to generate media spectacle out of art spectacle. Their anonymity is a calculated hindrance—meant both to block the celebrity-making mechanisms of the media and also to draw our attention to that mechanism.

In addition to their satirical public spectacles, the Bruces have taken on the task of running an alternative pedagogical art institution. Since 2009, the Bruces have lead the Bruce High Quality Foundation University—“ a learning experi- ment where artists work together to manifest creative, produc- tive, resistant, useless, and demanding interactions between art and the world» according to their website. The BHQFU is, in part, an attempt to separate arts education from practices that cater to the pecuniary interests (i.e. catering to investors, professionalizing art curriculum). They are obstinate in their intention not to allow money or celebrity to divert discourse about artworks. Their stance: just because artworks can be evaluated based on their monetary value does not mean that they are inseparable from their significance as potentially lucrative commodities. As one Bruce told the Independent: “Artworks are also potentially useful as ironing boards, yet we seem to have no trouble rendering them separable from household utilities.”

In accordance with their non-monetary stance, all of their classes are offered free of charge. Classes are open to anyone willing to participate, meaning there are no pre-requi- sites. Further separating itself from the conventions of art aca- demia, the school’s curriculum is developed by the students. This DIY mentality has led to an eclectic course catalogue ranging from “Advanced Drawing” to “You Watching Me Googling You,” none of which explicitly cater to professional or career applicability. Their unconventional methods are not an attempt at, “reforming the higher education,” as one Bruce told the Independent, but rather “starting from scratch”. In creating a community of artists that fosters artist-led educa- tion initiatives outside of prestige-mongering art academia, the University appears to be safeguarded against the effects of cherry-picking art-investors.

Despite its lofty goals, the B.H.Q.F.U. is not completely immune to the need and consequent effects of art-investment. While the University aspires to be accessible to everyone re- gardless of his or her ability to pay, such a model is financially unsustainable. One way it has tried to cope with this financial quandary is by taking steps toward becoming a 501(c)(3) non- profit organization. Until this nonprofit status materializes, the university depends on the support it can find in the art world. This Spring the Bruces will host a fundraising dinner with high-end art collectors in the West Village. Practically speaking, the dinner makes complete sense: the school needs money. Art collectors have money. Its very existence depends on the funds of the art-collectors, whose influence on MFA programs it attempts to subvert. This tension was apparent in 2010, when the Bruces hosted the satirical “Brucennial” on the same night as the Whitney Biennial, which included a piece by the Bruce High Quality Foundation. The Brucen- nial demonstrates an apparent contradiction in their touted anonymity. The anonymity of each member veiled by the collective name “Bruce” has garnered a celebrity-status of its own. This paradox has left many critics skeptical. That there is a growing imperative for alternatives to expensive, academic art programs is widely accepted, but are the Bruces changing the art education system from within or performing that which they claim to satirize?

Mortality is rough. In the throes of old age, rich men find themselves faced with a crippling paranoia: what if no one reads my memoir? One solution is to pay people, but this isa little crass. Better to include a map and hints to a treasure chest containing millions of dollars in gold coins and nuggets.

The Thrill of the Chase, a self-published memoir by Forrest Fenn, an 82-year-old art collector and gallery owner, which contains a poem with nine clues to the location of a hidden chest of gold and jewels, is currently sold out. Collected Works, an independent bookstore in Santa Fe that is the book’s exclusive retailer has more than 4,000 copies on back- order. “The phones are ringing off the hook,” said the store’s co-owner. The dozen copies available on Amazon range from $65 to $232.

After Fenn appeared on “The Today Show” last month, his website crashed from the heavy traffic of visitors reading his poem. Yet Fenn says he doesn’t expect anyone to find the trea- sure soon, and has told news sources it could take anywhere from 100 to 10,000 years. Indeed, the poem is cryptic. “If you’ve been wise and found the blaze, / Look quickly down, your quest to cease, / But tarry scant with marvel gaze, / Just take the chest and go in peace.”

His plan is to release subsequent clues each month on “The Today Show” for the foreseeable future. Last month, he re- vealed that the treasure is hidden more than 5,000 feet above sea level—and also informed one woman via email that it’s more than 300 miles west of Toledo. For those who assumed the treasure was hidden in the Rocky Mountains, these tips weren’t especially enlightening.

But Fenn says the real point is to encourage Americans to get outside more. “Get your kids out into the countryside, take them fishing and get them away from their little hand- held machines,” he said on “The Today Show.”

He believes he’s succeeded, and estimates that thousands of treasure hunters will set out in New Mexico this spring. He claims he’s received over 13,000 emails from treasure hunters, including 18 marriage proposals—a good tactic, since most believe Fenn’s net worth is significantly larger than his bounty, though he is currently married. Estimates of the treasure’s value vary from over $1 million (HuffPo) to nearly $3 million (Hemispheres Inflight Magazine).

The city is preparing for a big tourism boom. Many Santa Fe hotels now offer “Thrill of the Chase” packages which include an autographed copy of the now scarce book as well as a “scavenger hunt” (romantic? sexy?) There’s also a “Thrill of the Chase” signature cocktail: a light blend of rum, sweet ver- mouth and Amaretto di Saronno sprinkled with gold flakes; and a Forrest Fenn sandwich: pastrami with apple sauerkraut on marble rye (his favorite).

fenn loves antiquities, and his 36-inch alligator, Beowulf. He collects painted buffalo skins and Plains Indians medicine bonnets. In his study, he keeps a brandy bottle that Jackie Onassis left in his guest house and a pipe he claims belonged to Sitting Bull. His house has been raided by the FBI as part of an antiquities theft probe, and there has been speculation regarding his involvement with a large grave robbing case, though he claims the feds have subsequently dropped all charges against him.

In 1996, Fenn believed himself to be on his deathbed. He’d been diagnosed with kidney cancer and told there was a 20 percent chance he would live. His friend Ralph Lauren was visiting him, and, predictably, fell in love with Fenn’s Crow Indian Hat—covered in white ermine skins and carved antelope horns—and offered to buy it. When Fenn refused to sell it, claiming it was one of his favorites, Lauren apparently said, “Well, you can’t take it with you.”

Ralph’s harsh words inspired Fenn to think a little harder about his legacy. In fact, he had a rather radical change of heart, recently telling Hemipsheres that “anyone who dies with over $50 is a failure.” Reflecting, Fenn remembered how much he enjoyed hunting down Remingtons, Russels and O’Keeffes for his personal art collection, and decided there was only one way to pass on the thrill.

He bought an antique bronze chest and filled it with treasures: a jar of gold dust, gold coins, large and small gold nuggets, pre-Columbian gold animal figurines, and some jewelry, including a beloved bracelet of turquoise beads which was excavated from a Mesa Verde ruin in 1903, which Fenn won in a game of pool. At the bottom of the chest, in an olive jar, is an autobiography—apparently much more extensive than his memoir, and printed so small that the reader will need a magnifying glass.

Fenn’s original plan was to head to the desert with a a pocketful of sleeping pills and the treasure. “Sometime they’ll find my bones and the treasure, but my bio will be inside the box, so at least they’ll know who I was,” he told The Huffing- ton Post. Then, his cancer went into remission. He put off hiding the treasure until his 80th birthday, at which point, he said, “I just got tired of waiting.”

But it’s no walk in the park. Last month, a woman from Texas got lost during a storm in the mountains near Los Ala- mos while hunting. She was rescued the next day, and Fenn has posted caution notices on his web site and several blogs. “Flatlanders don’t realize how dangerous it can be,” he told the Associated Press.

Meanwhile, a treasure hunter caught digging under a descano—a marker that indicates where someone has died or had their ashes scattered—is facing charges for violating state preservation laws. Last week, Fenn sent an email to KOB- TV Eyewitness News speaking out against the charges. “It is beyond me why anyone would want to prosecute that man. If I were his judge, I would fine him 10 bucks and tell him not to do it again,” Fenn wrote. “What has happened to our basic senses?”

Authorities have also warned hunters that, depending on where the treasure is hidden, finders may not be keepers—if the treasure is on state or federal lands, it becomes public domain. Fenn has declined to reveal whether the treasure is buried or whether it is hidden on public lands, saying that would give too much away. When asked whether he had con- sidered land laws before hiding his chest, Fenn told the AP: “I’m staying out of those discussions, except to say that it may be fun to redefine some of the terms.”

Not a lot has been said regarding the possibility that this could all be a hoax. No doubt anticipating speculation, Fenn announced that he will receive no royalties from the book; all profits will go to cancer research. His friends have also been quick to vouch for his credibility.

“I have seen the treasure,” bestselling author Doug Preston (whose novel The Codex, about a notorious tomb raider and treasure hunter who buries himself and his treasure as a final challenge to his three sons is loosely based on Fenn) told the AP. “It’s real. And I can tell you that it is no longer in his vault…He is not a tricky, conspiratorial, slick or dishonest person at all.”

Besides, Preston said, “He is having way more than $1 mil- lion worth of fun with this.”

Bugs are crazy. My dad’s an entomologist so I can say this with some authority. Growing up my dad worked almost exclusively on the gypsy moth, which was cool, but spending hours every day with a famously virile species of invasive moth means that you become completely covered in their pheromones, which cannot be washed away and persist for years. So every spring during gypsy moth mating season, female moths would follow my dad around by the hundreds, landing on him and piling up in the back of his car. I thought this was normal but it was not. My dad was a gypsy moth sex god.

So, yeah, bugs work in mysterious ways. But there’s perhaps no greater entomological mystery than the North American cicada, which spends its entire life underground, only emerging once every 13 or 17 years depending on the brood. And get ready, because the cicadas are coming back this spring. After patiently feeding on roots since their conception in 1996, billions of so-called Brood II cicadas—one of the largest North American broods, stretching from North Carolina to Connecticut—are expected to emerge from their underground burrows in late April and early May. In some areas, including urban centers such as New York and Washington D.C., densities may even exceed one million per acre.

The whole point of this spectacle, of course, is sex. The deafening buzz of the cicada—which can exceed 100 dB—is the sound of the male courtship song. When a female likes a male’s tune, she clicks her wings to let him know she’s interested. After copulation, the female lays her eggs in the bark of a nearby tree. The rest, as they say, is history, and within a few weeks the entire brood dies as a new prime numbered cycle begins. According to entomologists, cicadas likely developed prime numbered emergence cycles as a way to prevent predators from synchronizing their population cycles to coincide with the cicada’s emergence. The fact that the numbers 13 and 17 only overlap every 221 years throws off predators by making it extremely rare for two broods to emerge in the same year.

Despite this incredible feat of evolution, cicadas have a bad reputation. Many people associate them with the evil locusts in the bible, though locusts are grasshoppers and cicadas are more like aphids. They do have scary red eyes and they are very loud but they will
not harm crops or bite children. Still, as we prepare for the coming invasion, there are a few things to keep in mind. You may want to avoid using power tools because female cicadas might mistake you for a male cicada and try and have sex with you. Harmless, but perhaps annoying. And don’t forget, cicadas are edible! Broiled, baked, or barbequed, they are an excellent source of protein, as my father would say. Apparently they taste like canned asparagus.—BE

STINK CAVE

Hell stinks, and there’s a swimming pool at the entrance.

At least, that’s what the ancient Romans thought. Last week, the ruins of the ceremonial gate to their hell—a noxious cave equipped with a bathing pool and religious buildings known as Plutonium—were unearthed by Italian archaeologists near the ruins of Hierapolis, an ancient city in present-day Turkey.

Earlier excavations at Hierapolis had yielded dozens of ruined structures. But when archaeologists dug deeper, retracing the route of an ancient spring back to its source, they found an opening in the earth—and right outside, the buried ruins of Plutonium.

Roman use of Plutonium dates to at least the first century AD, when Strabo, the Greek geographer, described the site in his Geographica. At that time, priests would offer animal sacrifices, and pilgrims would bathe in a constructed pool near the cave’s entrance. A small building nearby bore an inscription honoring the god of the underworld. The cause of the complex’s destruction, in the sixth century AD, is unclear—either it was torn down by Christians, destroyed by an earthquake, or both.

Alas, descending into the pit at Plutonium today won’t bring you any closer to the Horned One. There’s not much inside the cave—some stones, maybe, and the desiccated shells of ancient bugs that couldn’t find an exit. Hades is probably deeper down.

But what the site lacks in evil spirits, it makes up for in stench. Plutonium’s smell comes from the fumes that seep in from the back of the cavern. These underground vapors are hot, and they’re poisonous— so poisonous, in fact, that birds flocking to the entrance of the recently excavated site dropped dead out of the air. These deadly fumes, rich in carbon dioxide, convinced the Romans that here, near Hierapolis, lay the entrance to the underworld.

Plutonium was, naturally, a holy site, and in Roman times only the purest—only the chosen—could enter the cave itself. Obviously, that meant eunuchs. More specifically: the eunuchs of the fertility goddess Cybele. They had to hold their breath.

O men of Rome! Send not the corrupted into Plutonium! Let only the purest—the roundest and tubbiest—enter the Maw! —SPE